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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.1 (2001) 212-213



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Book Review

From Slavery to Freedom:
Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery


From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. By SEYMOUR DRESCHER. Foreword by STANLEY L. ENGERMAN. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. xxv, 454 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

Scholars of Atlantic slave systems and antislavery movements will welcome this volume containing 14 of Seymour Drescher's essays, written over the past 25 years, on the Atlantic slave trade and abolitionist movements. Stanley Engerman has written a foreword with his own judicious assessment of Drescher's contributions to the ongoing historical debates on slavery and slave systems in countries around the Atlantic Basin. This collection does not include everything Drescher has written, but it highlights his innovative contributions in a number of different areas. Best known for his work Econocide and other studies of the British abolition of slavery, some of which appear in this collection, this book also contains essays that range farther afield into comparative studies. These contain Drescher's more recent and often pioneering studies, putting into comparative perspective abolitionist movements that have been studied too frequently in isolation. He also includes a 1997 report card on Eric Williams's seminal study, Capitalism and Slavery, 50 years after its initial publication.

In his comparative work, Drescher has explored both similarities and differences between Anglo-American and continental forms of antislavery movements. In none of the examples he studies does he find any compelling evidence to buttress a close causal connection between capitalism and antislavery movements, strengthening his earlier criticisms of Williams's theories. His comparative analyses are, however, very helpful in identifying unique occurrences; for example, "France was a case of abolition without mass abolitionism" (p. 129) and Spain was [End Page 212] an extreme example of what he terms "the continental variant of abolitionism." The models he develops to explain the differences between continental and Anglo-American abolitionism themselves are useful, even if historians may be tempted to adhere too rigidly to them.

The Anglo-American antislavery struggle was distinguished by "mass appeal, decentralized organization, and extended duration" (p. 162). The continental model, in contrast, had more narrow political, social, and geographical bases, and it developed from top down, elite movements, responding to foreign (usually British) initiatives. Whereas in the Anglo-American variant, the rise of antislavery consciousness was linked to "new modes of social mobilization" (p. 221), he convincingly argues that "nowhere on the European continent was abolitionism a durable mass movement" (p. 207). His comparative analyses also enable him to state with confidence that the abolitionist process in Brazil and Hispanic America offers no further support for the connection of "capitalist development and abolition." Nor does the Dutch. "From beginning to end, the role of Dutch metropolitan capitalism in the abolition of slavery was nil" (p. 213). Drescher concludes from his wide-ranging tour around the Atlantic Basin that there was no link between abolition and economic growth "within the Iberian cultural zone on either side of the Atlantic" (p. 214).

More recently, he has focused his comparative microscope on the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, and on the emergence of scientific racism in Britain and France in the same period that witnessed the ending of the Atlantic slave traffic. Another recent essay demonstrates that the Jewish role in the major Atlantic slave trades of Britain and France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the Brazilian and Cuban slave trades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, "ranged from marginal to virtually nil" (p. 349). He does admit that these essays "found in the latter part of the book" illustrate both "the potential and the limits of slavery and the slave trade as subjects of comparative analysis." But even studying the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, he believes, can produce meaningful comparisons, although "the differences remain overwhelming" (p. 314)

Seymour Drescher has been unique among historians of...

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